Re: son of X-Face:

Jamie Zawinski (jwz@lucid.com)
Mon, 16 Aug 93 20:25:58 PDT

Cameron Simpson wrote:
>
> | I think restricting the image size so arbitrarily is a bad idea; 48x48 is
> | really tiny! All of my other icons are 64x64, and they just don't look all
> | that large. The same people who want color today will want bigger tomorrow.
>
> I used to think this way too, but it uses up so much screen real estate.

But that's the point: as DPI goes up, the icons get *smaller*. They don't
take up more mm on the glass, they just shrink. Bigger pixel counts don't
translate to more screen real estate over time, they just translate to better
image quality.

> - the images rapidly get too big to pump around as mail headers.
> I fear the day when the headers outweigh the message text by orders
> of magnitude.

They don't get big unless you make them big. If someone doesn't want their
headers to swell, then they'll just use a 48x48 image, right?

> | I think a good approach might be to use the XPM3 format as the baseline,
>
> Where could one find the spec for this?

export.lcs.mit.edu: contrib/xpm3.2g.tar.Z or something close to that.
I think a slightly older version also comes with X11R5. The pbmplus
toolkit can convert to xpm too.

-- Jamie